This letter looks at the most recent five-year performance of over one hundred of the world’s best university endowment chief investment officers.

We rank their returns, review their performance, and reveal their strategies for the decade ahead.

Endowment chief investment officers (and other non-profit CIOs) have an infinite investment horizon, a global playing field, and can invest in anything anywhere – within the broad policy limits set by their institution.  They are the top guns of the institutional investment world.

We recruit these investment heads for endowments, foundations, family offices and institutional investment firms.  And, we (and many others) regard the CIOs at major American universities and foundations as the best of the best.

A CIO candidate may have a sterling character, a stunning intellect, and a winning smile.  Those things do count.  But will he or she make money for our clients?  Recruiting a high-profile investment executive is a complex process, but it starts with objective measurements.

We compile the information presented in this report for internal use to help us as recruiters, and we think it will be useful to boards, trustees, CEOs and all our readers.

Chief investment officers “make things happen.”  Security selection, manager selection, timing, and fees play an important role in investment performance – allocations don’t explain everything!

We also uncover the emergence of a new consensus around a 60/40 – alternatives/public markets – portfolio, even as we report on the embarrassing success of the old 60/40 stocks/bonds

This is our SEER report: Skorina’s Enhanced Endowment Report.  The enhancements are the names and returns of individual CIOs (or OCIOs), data which are not readily available elsewhere.

If you need further information, or help with hiring decisions, please call on us anytime.

Now, on with the show: